Escape from WalMart's Stable, Michelle.

Among the many proofs that giant corporations own even the most populist, well-intentioned portions of our nation is the willingness of American leaders who presumably know better to promote and partner with egregious corporate criminal WalMart.

Bruce A. Dixon at Black Agenda Report, via Firedoglake:

Five or six years ago, Wal-Mart had a big problem. It was the largest private employer in the U.S., but its historic growth model was running up against a wall. There were simply no more small and medium sized towns whose markets could be swallowed, prevailing wages depressed, and whose family-owned hardware, grocery, clothing and other stores could be replaced by a publicly subsidized Wal-Mart. Most of the uncolonized territory, from Wal-Mart's point of view, was in and near large urban areas outside the South, places like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

The challenge, from Wal-Mart's point of view, was to identify and buy up a brand new bunch of public officials and opinion makers, many of them African American. Wal-Mart had to find and hire black and Latino-oriented advertising and PR agencies to write to write the commercials for those audiences, and stage the events where they handed out scholarships or basketball uniforms. They had to extend their model of public and secret tax breaks, campaign contributions, selective charity, and corporate welfare to a new bunch of elite participants, our own black political class.

Among the first and most prominent Wal-Mart conquests was Tavis Smiley, who at the time was still doing his annual State of the Black Union broadcasts on C-SPAN. And despite his doubtless sincere protestations against poverty, Tavis remains to this day an occupant of the Wal-Mart stable.

The facts are that new retail in existing urban and suburban areas is almost never a net job creator. People don't get more money to spend because there are more stores or different stores to spend it in. New retail, whether it's Ikea, Wal-Mart or whatever, simply diverts business from the places people already shop. Besides that, Wal-Mart's business model of corrupting public officials, lying about job creation numbers, rampant sex and race discrimination, relentlessly low wage and benefit levels, and aspirations to monopoly control of local markets across the country make it a bad neighbor, a worse boss, an unfair competitor and sometimes a criminal enterprise.

Recent news reports that top Wal-Mart officers conspired to hide evidence of how their culture of official bribery operated in Mexico have thrown its practices worldwide and here at home under renewed scrutiny by the public, and even by the Department of Justice. But revealing a corner of Wal-Mart's corrupt practices, which are really pretty much standard stuff everywhere in the capitalist world, and protecting the public against them are two very different things.

Protecting black America against the ravages of corporate capitalism has never been the strong suit of today's black political class. In that class alone, Wal-Mart has many more players in its pocket than just Tavis Smiley. Former Atlanta congressman and mayor Andrew Young was a prominent early sellout to Wal-Mart. Since then the retail giant has acquired hundreds of local preachers and politicians like Chicago aldermen for example, often purchased for what look like embarrassingly small contributions to their churches, political war chests or favorite charities, unless there are other sums of money under the table which the records don't reflect.

Perhaps the biggest single black notable in the Wal-Mart pocket these days is the First Lady, Michelle Obama.

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As the White House's resident advocate for healthy eating and exercise, Ms. Obama has leveraged her image as a priceless asset to Wal-Mart, endorsing its drive to penetrate new urban markets, crush competition, and gobble up even more public tax breaks and subsidies. But in the real world, more urban Wal-Marts, and giving more public subsidies and market share to the amoral company that already accounts for 27 cents of every dollar spent on groceries in this country is not so much the solution to urban “food deserts” as it is the solution to Wal-Mart's problem of how to raise that 27 cents to 30, 40 or 50 cents of every grocery dollar in its corporate coffers. That's the problem Michelle Obama is helping solve, not the problem of accessing decent food at reasonable prices.

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Nobody sensible believes recent reports of rampant corruption in Wal-Mart's board rooms are anything but the smallest tip of a glacier of bribery, conspiracy and criminality. There are competing visions in the land. One is the vision of our black political class, our black misleadership class, of which Michelle Obama is a prominent member. Their vision is about extending corporate power, not protecting us from it. Ultimately it's we who need protection from them.

Read the whole thing.

It has been barely four decades since corporations seeking the kind of political influence criminals like WalMart now take for granted would be laughed - if not tarred, feathered and railroaded - out of town.

The knowledge and moral center that enabled such political independence from corporations resides in living memory. It is not quite yet a lost art.

Michelle Obama rejecting WalMart would make huge strides toward restoring that independence.